Benedict XVI has authorised ‘severe cautionary and disciplinary measures’ against Father Tomislav Vlasic, the former ‘spiritual director’ to six children who said Our Lady was appearing to them at Medjugorje in Bosnia.
The Franciscan priest has been suspended after he refused to cooperate into claims of scandalous sexual immorality ‘aggravated by mystical motivations’.
He has also been accused of ‘the diffusion of dubious doctrine, manipulation of consciences, suspected mysticism and disobedience towards legitimately issued orders’, and is suspected of heresy and schism.

A well-connected Rome source reports that Forward in Faith, the umbrella group for conservative Anglo-Catholics in the C of E, is talking to the Vatican about corporate union. Here’s the odd thing about the rumour: it claims that Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna is meeting with Bishop John Broadhurst of Fulham at the suggestion of the Holy Father.

The model for the move to Rome could be the proposed reception of the Traditional Anglican Communion into the Catholic Church. But Broadhurst has very firmly denied that Forward in Faith is throwing in its lot with the TAC, a rebel Anglican group that has already submitted to the Magisterium.[I assume that should read “has already made a submission”?? Or did I miss something??]

Now, if there’s one thing I know about Bishop Broadhurst is that he’s a wily old fox. He blows hot and cold on the subject of Rome, perhaps because he was baptised a Roman Catholic. I’m sure he wouldn’t dream of joining the TAC in any shape or form – but he’ll be jolly interested in the details of any deal it does with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

But why involve the Archbishop of Vienna, Count Christoph Maria Michael Hugo Damian Peter Adalbert von Schönborn? (OK, so he doesn’t use his aristocratic title, but what a cool name.) I don’t know. Perhaps it was just a suggestion that Vienna and Fulham should meet. But my source is close enough to high-level figures in the curia for me to be sure that there’s something significant going on.

As there should be. For crying out loud, there is no future at all for theologically literate Anglo-Catholic opponents of women bishops in the Church of England. Some of the gutless ones can stick their fingers in their ears and pretend not to hear the resounding, overwhelming support for women bishops coming from the Church’s ruling elite; they can build their own Wendy House “jurisidiction” that allows them to keep on claiming their stipend inside a liberal Protestant denomination.

The more honest ones face a simple choice: where do they go next? If they can’t stand Catholics, they can become Eastern Orthodox. They can found or join an independent Anglican Church (there are hundreds out there).[How is that option any different than staying??] Or they can seek union with the See of Peter, reasonably confident that the power of the trad-hating RC “Magic Circle” is waning and that the Pope is on their side.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said the Anglican church may have to accept a “two-tier” or “two-track” communion for believers to remain united while in disagreement over matters such as gay clergy.

He wrote on his website on Monday that there are “two styles of being Anglican” and both sides should work together to maintain the church, WA Today reported.

In the formal response to the move this month by the Episcopal Church, the US branch of the Anglican Communion, to welcome gay bishops and blessing same sex couples, the Los Angeles Times quotes Archbishop Williams saying that those who remain part of the communion’s “covenantal structure,” would take one path and another with “fewer formal expectations” for those who value autonomy.

“It helps to be clear about these possible futures, however much we think them less than ideal, and to speak about them not in apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication but plainly as what they are, two styles of being Anglican, whose mutual relation will certainly need working out,” Williams wrote.

For those within the Communion who disagree, he says, paraphrasing Matthew’s lines about heretics, “there is no threat of being cast into outer darkness, existing relationships will not be destroyed that easily.”

The Episcopal church in the US caused an uproar among some Anglicans in 2003 by consecrating the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Williams has struggled since to keep the communion unified, the WA Today report said.

Cardinal John Henry Newman will be beatified in Birmingham, England on May 2, 2010, reports say.

The date and venue have been proposed by the Vatican Congregation for Saints’ Causes and are expected to be accepted soon by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, a church source has told Catholic News Service.

The source said the cardinal will be beatified in the Birmingham Oratory, which he founded following his conversion to Catholicism in 1845 at age 44.

May 2 is seen as a favourable date because it is the feast of St Athanasius, the fourth century “champion of orthodoxy” admired by Cardinal Newman, CNS says.

Pope Benedict signed the decree authorising the beatification earlier this year after Vatican medical and theological experts approved the 2001 healing of Deacon John Sullivan of Marshfield, Massachusetts in the US, who was ” bent double” by a severe spinal condition, as a miracle attributed to Cardinal Newman’s intercession.

Patron

St Anselm of Canterbury

Disclaimer

If we have said anything that needs correction, I am willing to make the correction if it be a reasonable one. But, if the conclusions which we have arrived at by reason seem confirmed by the testimony of the truth, then ought we to attribute it, not to ourselves, but to God, who is blessed forever. Amen.